Many print/copy jobs which are being performed in a document production environment require that the pages of the job be bound together in a manner specified by the customer. Many large print/copy production jobs require diverse bindings as part of the customer's requirements to produce financial reports, notebooks, professional surveys, sales presentations, cookbooks, calendars, to name a few. Such bindings are automatically added to the print/copy job. First, a die punches the appropriate number of holes in the right size, alignment, spacing, and configuration. The punched pages are then bound by a binder which threads the corresponding binding through the punched holes to finish the job and produce a final product for the customer.
To achieve this, a technician typically loads a hopper with the appropriate bindings desired by the customer and manually installs the correct automatic hole punching unit into the document reproduction device. As the print/copy job is run, the hole punch device aligns the job and uses a die to punch holes through the document pages. The punched pages are then provided to a binding unit which proceeds to thread the corresponding binding through the punched holes. Such machines tend to operate at high speeds with many device capable of binding upwards of 1000 units/hour. If, for instance, the holes were punched through the job by the wrong punch unit and the hopper is loaded with bindings for a different hole configuration, the binder will likely jam as it tries to thread a binding through misaligned holes. Such misalignment may cause the system to be off-line until the jam is cleared. Taking a document reproduction system off-line, even temporarily, to clear such jams reduces job throughput and adversely impacts productivity.
Many hole punch units generally comprise different dies each having their own punch layouts, # of holes, hole size, hole spacing, etc. Dies are often custom built by 3rd party providers and have limited interfacing capability with the print/copy systems wherein the die is installed. Further, many of the punch die sets are visibly similar and difficult to distinguish. As such, a technician has to manually open the device and visually examine the installed punch die to obtain, for example, a serial number or a code from the unit in order to determine which unit is presently installed on the device. Then, the technician has to determine whether the installed punch die is compatible with the binding in the binding hopper. This often involves referencing a manual of die serial numbers with various bindings to determine if the right die is installed for the selected binding. This can be a time consuming processes.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art are increasingly sophisticated systems and methods for identifying the hole punch die currently installed on a document reproduction device and for preventing the device from performing a print/copy job if there is a mismatch between the binding selected for the job and the installed die.